Rocket explosion shows Musk's 'successful failure'

LOS ANGELES — The spectacular explosion of SpaceX's new Starship rocket minutes after it soared off its launchpad on a first flight test is the latest vivid illustration of a "successful failure" business formula that serves Elon Musk's company well, experts said on Thursday.

SpaceX blew up the uncrewed rocket four minutes after it blasted off at 8:33 am from Starbase, the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.

The spacecraft that will eventually carry crew and cargo had been scheduled to separate from the first-stage rocket booster three minutes into the flight, but separation failed to occur and the rocket disintegrated into a ball of fire over the Gulf of Mexico.

"The vehicle experienced multiple engines out during the flight test, lost altitude, and began to tumble," SpaceX said. "The flight termination system was commanded on both the booster and ship."

It is standard procedure to destroy a wayward rocket to prevent damage to people or property below.

But SpaceX executives including Musk, the founder, CEO and chief engineer of the California-based rocket company, hailed the test flight for achieving the major objective of getting the vehicle off the ground, while providing a wealth of data that will advance Starship's development.

At least two experts that spoke with Reuters agreed that the test flight delivered benefits.

"This is a classical SpaceX successful failure," said Garrett Reisman, an astronautical engineering professor at the University of Southern California and senior adviser to SpaceX.

Reisman called the Starship test flight a hallmark of a SpaceX strategy that sets Musk's company apart from traditional aerospace companies and even NASA by "this embracing of failure when the consequences of failure are low".

Planetary scientist Tanya Harrison, a fellow at the University of British Columbia's Outer Space Institute, said clearing the launch tower and ascending through a critical point known as maximum aerodynamic pressure were major feats on the first flight of such a large, complex launch system.

"It's part of the testing process," she said. "There are a lot of accidents that happen when you're trying to design a new rocket. The fact that it launched at all made a lot of people really happy."

She said the risks of a single flight test were small in comparison to the ambitious gains at stake.

Musk has billed Starship as crucial to SpaceX's interplanetary exploration goals as well as its more near-term launch business, with commercial satellites, science telescopes and eventually paying astro-tourists expected to use the fully reusable rocket system for rides to space.

It wasn't all bad news for Musk, SpaceX and Twitter CEO, on Thursday.

At least Twitter actually met its self-imposed deadline to start removing blue checks from verified accounts.

Twitter began making good on its promise on Thursday to remove the blue checks from accounts that do not pay a monthly fee to keep them. Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system, many of them journalists, athletes and public figures.

Agencies via Xinhua